‹ Hampton Beach.' 65 'Now rest we, where this grassy mound His feet hath set In the green waters, which have bound His granite ankles greenly round With long and tangled moss, and weeds with cool spray wet. Here, where these sunny waters break, And ripples this keen breeze, I shake All burdens from the heart, all weary thoughts away. "I draw a freer breath-I seem Like all I see Waves in the sun-the white-winged gleam Of sea-birds in the slanting beam— And far-off sails which flit before the south wind free. 'So when Time's veil shall fall asunder, The soul may know No fearful change, nor sudden wonder, Nor sink the weight of mystery under, But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow. 'And all we shrink from now, may seem No new revealing; Familiar as our childhood's stream, A pleasant memory of a dream, The loved and cherished past upon the new life stealing. 'Serene and mild the untried light May have its dawning And as in summer's northern night The evening and the dawn unite, The sunset hues of Time blend with the soul's new morning. 'I sit alone: in foam and spray Wave after wave Breaks on the rocks, which, stern and grey, Beneath like fallen Titans lay, Or murmurs hoarse and strong through mossy cleft and cave. 'What heed I of the dusty land And noisy town? I see the mighty deep expand From its white line of glimmering sand, To where the blue of heaven on bluer waves shuts down! 'In listless quietude of mind I yield to all The change of cloud, and wave, and wind, And, passive on the flood reclined, I wander with the waves, and with them rise and fall. 'But look, thou dreamer!-wave and shore In shadow lie; The night wind warns me back once more To where my native hill-tops o'er Bends like an arch of fire the glowing sun-set sky.' "And this,' said the great Chamberlain, 'is poetry! this flimsy manufacture of the brain, which, in comparison with the lofty and durable monuments of genius, is as the gold filigree-work of Zamara beside the eternal architecture of Egypt.' FADLADEEN, who came out in this gorgeous style at the conclusion of Paradise and the Peri, was an awful critic, and we are not sure that Hampton Beach would entirely suit his taste. But to critics in general we submit these verses with confidence. We régard them as one of the most perfect poems the language has produced. Nor do we remember any other poem resembling it, though the subject is not a very uncommon one. The seawho that writes poetry does not write about the sea? A poet who had forgotten to do this would be expelled from Parnassus by general consent. The varied effusions which this subject has called forth exhibit, as may naturally be supposed, all shades of feeling,-the profoundest love and veneration on one hand, and the deepest dislike on the other. Barry Cornwall's hero will have nothing but 'the sea, the sea,'-living or dying, this must be the element. Of a similar way of thinking was a gentleman who many years since made his appeal to the public through the medium of Blackwood's Magazine, beseeching them, by all that was affecting, not to let his remains be put in the earth, where they could never be easy: 'O, lay me not in earth to rest ; There I should never, never sleep : Its To others the sea is man's worst of natural enemies. surface is the battling-ground for storms and hurricanes, and its lonely depths the depositories of its various spoils,—'a thousand men, that fishes gnaw upon, wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, inestimable stones, unvalued jewels.' Whittier neither sides with the one nor the other. The fairest inland panorama that can be furnished by the whole range of nature's brightest landscapes cannot equal the materials of this picture,—the vast and limitless ocean stretching away till in the far distance the 'blue of heaven shuts down on bluer waves,'' the 'innumerable dimplings' (åvýpiÐμov yéλaoμa) of its quietly restless waters freshened by the southern breezes,-the hot and hazy sunshine that envelopes the blue expanse, with its white and sparkling beach of sand, and the 'glittering ships' that, coming no one knows whence, are sailing no one knows whither, the strange and mystic mingling of all things seen with all that is mysterious and invisible,-these are just the elements under whose influence the dreamer bids good bye to pain and care, and gives himself up to wander, rise, and fall with the waves before him. The misfortune is that there is only one class of readers on whom this poem can take effect; for, alas! to the other part the sea, and all belonging to it, is only an article of their faith. They have never seen what Whittier talks about. They believe in the ocean just as they believe in the Andes, or the Giant's Causeway, or Adam's Peak. They may sometimes have imagined that they have caught the thing, not knowing what a world of difference there is between a salt-water view and a sea view. To such persons Whittier is a barbarian; they know not what is piped or harped. They must be borne with, for in most cases it is not their own fault; but they are profoundly to be pitied. We must hasten to the last that stands on our list,-MRS. LYDIA H. SIGOURNEY. This lady has been called the American Mrs. Hemans; and though it can hardly be said that the two writers have very much in common, there are certainly some productions of the former which, had we to guess at their parentage, would at once be ascribed to the author of the Voice of Spring, and the Treasures of the Deep. Take the following lines to the Coral Insects: 'Ye bind the deep with your secret zone, There are serpents to coil ere the flowers are up; Here the image and superscription of the English lyrist seem plain enough to swear to in a court of justice. But, although we often find, on topics which suggest a similar train of thought, this close resemblance between the two, Mrs. Sigourney has a wider range of subjects; and in her treatment of them has a freshness and variety that stand in very agreeable contrast with the wearisome monotony which runs through the Songs of the Affections. The American songstress can also be sprightly, and at least, as far as her intention goes-facetious and humorous: we should not gather from the writings of Mrs. Hemans that she was aware of a joke having ever been made since the beginning of the world. But this will hardly meet the requirements of popular and successful poetry. The emotions of the soul, like the muscles of the body, must be separately called into action; and although we may not often look for the Shakspearean genius that can so sweep all the chords of the instrument as to awaken from each of them its befitting music, no mortal patience can stand the everlasting twanging of a single string. If to this we add that a large proportion of Mrs. Hemans's poetry was hastily thrown off to meet the exigencies of the hour, and that she never truly understood how wide is the distance between poetical feeling and poetical conception, it is not wonderful that with the exception of a few lyrics which have become household words, her effusions as a whole are rapidly passing to the limbo of forgotten authors. Of Mrs. Sigourney's poetry a far greater proportion will probably remain; but we cannot endorse the wholesale panegyrics with which her editor introduces the volume before us. We are told that 'every printed poem in the present collection will leave its own bright impression upon the reader's heart, with just such sunshine and power as must leave him or her without the inducement to look upon any other landscape, or listen to any other voice.' In spite of this high-flown eulogium, and the lawyer American Blank Verse. 69 like precision of language which tells us that the poetry will leave him or her' without the inducement to read anything else, we must respectfully submit that Mrs. Sigourney is only one of a very large class of readable poets. Many of her pieces have great merit; many more, though pleasant enough, and not apparently lacking any of the requisites of good poetry, induce no desire for a second perusal; and this we regard as fatal to all high pretensions. With the metaphysics of this question we do not deal; but the reader cannot have failed to notice the fact itself, that vast quantities of published poetry, the production of elegant, tasteful, and accomplished minds, and in which the most critical investigation can discover nothing that should prevent its living for ages, is yet felt to be only the poetry of a day. We may read it by the volume, or by the dozen volumes; and when we have admired and praised it we dare not think the world would be much the loser if it was never again heard of. But there is another poetry, which does not come under this description; poetry which, without challenging criticism, or asking our approbation, enters the heart at once, and abides there for ever. We read it, and cannot forget it if we would; it intertwines itself with 'All thoughts, all passions, all delights, and becomes henceforth a part of our very existence. One means of beguiling the middling class of poets into a profitless exuberance of song, is the temptation presented by blank verse. In this species of composition our American authoress deals somewhat largely; but it hardly needs to be observed, that no order of poetry so much requires the hand of a master, and that therefore so few who undertake it can really do it justice. Lured by its freedom from the trammels of rhyme, and by the stately and imposing march of its numbers, they too frequently forget that the commonest inanities may be served up in this form, and that the general material of a newspaper might with small trouble be done into a moderately sublime poem by embodying it in blank verse: • Sorrow as on the sea. A woman mourns |